ANDROMEDA GALAXY CORE
I got to see it with my own eyes for the first time!! It looked like a gray oval-ish but slightly pointy smudge. But it’s a cool smudge in the sky!!
This is a phone pic with a 2s exposure and ISO cranked up to it’s max, 3200. The rainbow snow is random noise from my sensor magnified by turning the sensitivity up very high. You can even see M32 as a slightly fuzzy star almost directly above Andromeda’s core!
I’m really glad I found it. Aiming the telescope was annoying, but rubber bands on the mount helped it keep its aim. I guess that means when I tried and failed to find the ring nebula, it’s just too faint to see in my light polluted sky.
I took many 1s exposures, too. I need to figure out how to stack them and use astronomy software but that’s a process for another time